The First Specialist School Nurses in 17 Years Graduate From @uwshealth

Our School would like to congratulate the first class of specialist school nurses to qualify in Scotland since 2001. Five new specialist School Nurses graduated last Thursday (15th. November 20018), following the reintroduction of the Specialist Community Public Health Nursing (School Nursing) Course at the University in 2017.

Fully-qualified NHS nurses Vivienne Adamson, Corrine McIvor, Lee Morrison, Vikki Murphy and Debbie Smart, were sponsored by various NHS Health Boards to complete the course, which focussed on developing specialist healthcare skills to meet the needs of children and young adults between the ages of five and 19.

Located across Scotland, from Glasgow to the Western Isles, the students were taught via a combination of distance learning, online tutorials and on-campus learning.

UWS is one of only three institutions in Scotland delivering a Specialist Community Public Health Nurse programme for school nurses, and is currently educating a further 15 students.

The course was reintroduced after Scotland’s Chief Nursing Officer, Fiona McQueen, called for school nurses to be educated to enable them to support children with their emotional health and wellbeing.

Julie Edgar, Dean of the School Health & Life Sciences at UWS, said:

“We are very proud of our graduates and also to be delivering this course. Some of our graduates had previously been working within school nursing teams for several years and were simply waiting for an opportunity to qualify, showing there’s demand for specialist skills. The emotional health and wellbeing of young people is particularly important and this is central to their qualification. We are pleased to see the Scottish Government planning to allocate more funding to train nurses, as well as prioritise specialist nursing, as this will be key to ensuring children in Scotland have equal access to specialist care.”